Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World by William Davies – review

At odds with ourselves: the People’s Vote march in central London on 20 October was yet another demonstration of divisions within the UK.
Photograph: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Barcroft Images

In a recent essay in the London Review of Books, John Lanchester said that if you wanted to understand anything about the state of the world today, you had to look at what led to the crash 10 years ago and its aftermath – and to do that, you need not economists but sociologists. Economists, after all, are mostly followers of, as well as students of, capitalism. William Davies is just the kind of sociologist Lanchester might be talking about, the kind we need right now to tease out what Raymond Williams used to call a “structure of feeling”. Here is someone willing to excavate and trace what underpins our current sense of anxiety.

There is no doubt that we live in anxious times, no longer trusting either experts or politicians, fearful of terror, often dwelling in the past, unsure what the criteria for truth are in a world of alternative facts. We are viscerally geared up for imminent catastrophe. Davies defines this as our “nervous state”, always teetering on the edge of conflict.

How have we reached this place? Is this a rational way to be? Davies unpicks the history of ideas – Hobbes’s commitment to reason, Descartes’s mind/body split – to show that, as these foundational concepts have been shaken, we have unravelled. The ground no longer feels solid. There is a strong sense of Hannah Arendt running through this work. Arendt analysed power and spoke of the west’s “curious passion for objectivity”. It has produced experts armed with statistics that bear little relationship to lived reality. Take the narrative of progress, for instance: the fact is, says Davies, that more than half the US populace has experienced no economic progress for 40 years.

That this may cause resentment is hardly surprising, and resentment is the key emotion in the rise of populism. Nationalism does not arise unbidden but occurs when emotions such as fear, anxiety and, I would suggest, loneliness can find no democratic voice.

Brexit is the obvious example, as Davies reminds us. I get bored with remainers quoting statistics at leavers to demonstrate that they have their facts wrong. Really, they are telling them that their feelings are wrong. But dismissing the irrational does not destroy it. Brexit is sometimes described as self-harm, blowing apart the accepted wisdom that people vote primarily for economic reasons. However, for those suffering, self-harm is a taking back of agency.

Nationalism occurs when emotions such as fear, anxiety and, I would suggest, loneliness can find no democratic voice

In a brilliant chapter, Davies centres the physical body in political discourse. Those suckered in by populist and nationalist movements, both in Europe and the US, tend to be those living with pain, chronic illness and depression, he suggests. Pain creates “an absence of narrative”, while populism, by channelling resentment, provides one. He describes how pain, and the promise of its end via the market, is precisely what created the OxyContin epidemic. Yet people still trust the market more than government. Even as it throws up “warrior-entrepreneurs”, as Davies calls them, such as Peter Thiel and Arron Banks, who pose as anti-elite despite their huge wealth.

Such people glide through the post-truth world with a promise that we can have more control. Social media adds to this illusion. Davies fizzes with lucidity on Zuckerberg’s “attention economy” and how it requires us to invest emotionally more and more.

At times, Davies’s weaving together of so many ideas feels overwhelming in an Adam Curtissy way, and it is hard to know where this will lead us. He has nothing to say on gender, which is interesting. But perhaps that’s another book.

What he is certainly doing is pointing towards the need to reset traditional political analysis, which doesn’t take contradictory feelings into account. Take immigration: people can feel simultaneously threatened and understand that their lives are enhanced by it.

Davies is a wonderfully alert and nimble guide and his absorbing and edgy book will help us feel our way to a better future. After all, it is only through understanding our anxiety and acknowledging our pain that a different world can be made. Psychotherapists call this “the work” and Davies is doing some of the heavy lifting and probing for us.

• Nervous States by William Davies is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.61 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99